That’s exactly what Bruce Harrison, the mastermind behind Family Forest®, would have thought before he spent tens of thousands of hours questing through the nooks and crannies of recorded history, filtering and distilling the knowledge that was assembled by experts, and digitally-indexing the results into an amazingly interconnected network of ancestral pathways that can now be explored visually.

The attached chart is a small example of the answers the Family Forest® can generate. Here’s what you will find: The first column is 21 people. The second column shows their connection to the Oscars, and the third column shows their role. The next four columns show the computer-generated relationships of the 21 people in the first column to other people.

The fifth column is Seth MacFarlane, Host of the 85th Academy Awards. The next column is to the 8th Earl of Carnarvon, the present Lord of Highclere Castle, which is the setting for PBS’ enormously popular series Downton Abbey.

Highclere Castle is also the setting for “Lady Almina And The Real Downton Abbey”, a present-day New York Times best-seller written by the 8th and current Countess of Carnarvon. The 8th Earl of Carnarvon has extensive early Colonial American ancestry, which makes him a single-digit cousin to many millions of Downton Abbey fans. Almost half of the people in the column are his single-digit cousins.

The following column is to the founder of Briquebec Castle.“This one is the most fascinating to me,” says Harrison, “because, according to the recorded history mapped out in the Family Forest®, it is one of my own ancestral homes.” And not only does Briquebec Castle have Knights Templar history (remember the “Da Vinci Code”?), but it is possible to book a stay at the castle tonight, and it is the focal point of what may be the world’s largest eBook. In addition to Briquebec being an ancestral home to at least 20 of the 21 people in column one, it is also an ancestral home of the 8th Earl of Carnarvon, owner of Highclere Castle, and the Harbaugh brothers.

And speaking of the Harbaugh brothers, the last column is to the two of them who will be making history by dueling in Super Bowl XLVII this coming Sunday, Baltimore Ravens head coach John Harbaugh and San Francisco 49ers head coach Jim Harbaugh.